The Progressive Education Fallacy in Developing Countries

Download or read book The Progressive Education Fallacy in Developing Countries written by Gerard Guthrie and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-23 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a provocative but carefully argued addition to the theory and practice of education in developing countries. The book provides an ethical and empirical justification for support of formalistic teaching in primary and secondary schools in developing countries. It also refutes the application of progressive education principles to curriculum and pre- and in-service teacher education in such contexts. The central focus of this book is the formalistic teaching prevalent in the classrooms of many developing countries. Formalistic (‘teacher-centred’, ‘traditional’, ‘didactic’, ‘pedagogic’) teaching is appropriate in the many countries with revelatory epistemologies, unpopular and old-fashioned though these methods may seem in some western, especially Anglophone, ones. Formalism has been the object of many failed progressive curriculum and teacher education reforms in developing countries for some 50 years.